It was crashy: some of the external processes like *gasp* javac, would hang and cause 100% CPU usage indefinitely. Last year I took the same source code, and used windows ports of kzip and others. The results were so bad (as in: not even close ) that I didn't bother to continue the effort.

It's really not rocket science... it's just that you rely on external processes which either do a good or bad job.

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Maybe an applet that uses the client's processing power to generate the jar, instead of the server?

Needs a good Java zip library. kzip is only distributed as binary, and while 7zip is open source it would still need porting.

Hasn't java got a built-in zipping library?

Yes, but it's a bog standard one, and probably uses a simple greedy parser. A good zip library will squeeze a few more bytes out. As a quick test I've just compressed a group of already fairly well compressed programs I had sitting in my temp directory with both jar and kzip. jar got them down to 90.6% of the original size, and kzip to 88.6% of the original size.

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